This Program Project includes five research projects organized in a cooperative effort to investigate the developmental processes that characterize high-risk and retarded children. The research projects deal with infants' neurological development, attention, and language development, as well as cognitive processes such as information input, rehearsal, and organizing factors, as they are related to the intellectual functioning of preschool and older children. The children at high-risk for mental retardation are selected from the patient population of the St. Mary's Hospital Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. The objectives of the Project are to 1) identify and systematically investigate processes important for the development of intellectual competence, 2) identify differences in the functioning of these processes and specify their course of development in high-risk, retarded and normal children, 3) determine the value of process difference information in predicting the later intellectual competence of high-risk children, and 4) provide basic information about the processes underlying intellectual competence that will be of value in developing remediation and/or compensatory procedures for those performing at a subaverage intellectual level.